The Codex Commision

Sometimes when you get a close-up look at a monster it turns out to be not so monstrous after all.

In previous e-Alerts I’ve told you about the Codex Alimentarius Commission, an international food standards program created by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization. Codex is designed to develop consumer health guidelines and ensure fair trade practices.

One of the purposes of the Codex Commission is to “harmonize” international food trade among member countries, including the U.S. Just how extensive the Codex “harmonizing” might turn out to be has caused some fearful speculation among those of us in the complementary and alternative medicine field.

Those fears were certainly not unfounded. After all, when an international regulatory agency gears up for business, you can be pretty certain that a bloated and narrow-minded bureaucracy will come lumbering after.

As it’s been described to me, Codex is actually a list of standards that countries can choose to adopt, rather than a set of regulations that will be imposed upon them. In that case, the U.S.’s relationship with the World Health Organization would not compel us to adopt it.

So it now appears that Codex will have no adverse or overriding effect on the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA). In a nutshell, DSHEA classifies and regulates dietary supplements as food. Moreover, the act was designed to give consumers the freedom to make their own healthcare choices by keeping the FDA from severely restricting the manufacture and sale of dietary supplements.

As long as DSHEA remains intact, we should be in reasonably good shape. Recent attempts by some U.S. congressmen to change DSHEA and grant the FDA greater powers have languished in congressional committees. As always, I’ll keep an eye on those bills and I’ll let you know about any developments.

In the meantime, this quote from the National Nutritional Foods Association (NNFA) is reassuring: “Since the Codex Supplement Guidelines do not require any change to DSHEA, the guidelines will not have any practical impact on sales of dietary supplements in the United States, by either suppliers or retailers. DSHEA will continue to govern domestic sales.”

If you’d like to read more, you can access the NNFA Codex resource center at nnfa.org.

In addition, we’ll keep watching to see if Codex does present any further threat to our health care freedom. Because sometimes the monster really is a beast.